It traveled for over two years to institutions including the Speed Museum, Louisville; the Brooklyn Museum; The Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles; The Institute for The Arts, Rice University, Houston; The Detroit Institute of Art; the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the Field Museum, Chicago, where it was paired with an exhibition organized by Richard Powell, “African Insights: Sources for Afro-American Art and Culture.” 

It was greeted with nearly universal acclaim. In a March 1, 1982 Time Magazine review called “Finale for the Fantastical,” for instance, Robert Hughes characterized the work in the exhibition as “fiery, marvelous, and strong;” there were also positive reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, among many other newspapers and magazines. Writing from a more academic perspective in a 1983 Winterthur Portfolio article titled “Black Art, Folk Art, and Social Control,” Eugene Metcalf criticized the exhibition for confusing the traditions of folk art with a more idiosyncratic and “gratuitous” creativity, and for perpetuating, however inadvertently, the hierarchies of fine and folk, Black and white.

The exhibition received perhaps its most nuanced evaluation in Paul Arnett’s introduction to Volume One of the epic publication Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South (2000). More recently, it was the focus of a curatorial roundtable, “Black Folk Art Redux,” published in the catalogue of Lynne Cooke’s 2018 National Gallery of Art exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, where it was characterized as “one of the seminal exhibitions in the history of American art.”